Awakening the Mind PA: A Guide to Harnessing the Power of Your Brainwaves

Though the waves emanating from regions of my brain might have some influence over other regions within my brain or even more distant phenomena (e.g. people) - that is, though they might carry some intrinsic quality of power as the subtitle suggests - Wise fails to make a clear point of it. She does, however, convince me that she has studied the recorded brainwaves of many people widely recognized as "spiritually enlightened" and that she has uncovered a pattern or "signature" for the cognitive state most people call "enlightenment". From those observations, and many years teaching techniques in meditation, she has refined her meditative "induction scripts" (to borrow from the lexicon of hypnotherapy) to quickly achieve the various modes of cognition associated with each pattern.

Before you get too excited, let me explain that the patterns, as she describes them, aren't sophisticated. Our brains generate four quite distinct brain waves (in varying combination) corresponding to four modes or qualities of consciousness that we experience in four distinct spatial regions of the brain. Beta, alpha, theta, and delta map to linguistic, sensory, and the emotive subconscious, which map to the cortex, etc. Anna doesn't get much beyond this simplicity except to say that brainwave recordings of enlightened people tend to show equal participation of each wave and thus each mode of thought in the mind.

To make the point, Anna beats quite a few horses to death after torturing them with her writing and straining to turn brainwaves into something more than they are. For example, when describing theta waves, Anna writes:

Theta is where we hold our "stuff." If you have any "stuff" (and who doesn't), you know what I'm talking about-the unclear emotional material that each of us collects over the course of our lifetime, sometimes called "baggage" or "garbage." -- pg. 11

From this and passages like it, Anna leads us to believe that she considers brainwaves actual "regions" of the brain . . . "repositories." It gets worse. And this passage isn't the only one in which she reveals a bias toward psychtherapeutic techniques for personal change and healing. If only she could stick to brainwaves.

In fairness, she has probably worked with the concepts so long that, for her, they have become a bit blurry. But this quality of thought - fuzzy mental categories and hyperbole - smacks of a smart person that failed to get over the novelty of an experience . . . or just bad marketing.

I've yet to spend time with her exercises. And maybe only then will I understand. So I will keep this text around, if only on the faith that what Anna's learned about brainwaves make the meditation all the better. Better yet, I'll get an EEG machine for myself.